There’s a thing going around the Interwebs where it’s said that you can automatically make any book better by inserting the sentence “And then the murders began” right after the first sentence. I didn’t believe this, so I tested it on Stardancer:
Edith Keeler: And you, um, don’t want to talk about it? Why? Oh. Did you… did you do something wrong? Are you afraid of something? Whatever it is, let me help.
Capt. Kirk: “Let me help.” A hundred years or so from now, I believe, a famous novelist will write a classic using that theme. He’ll recommend those three words even over “I love you.”
Fifty years ago today, “The City on the Edge of Forever” aired for the first time. This episode of Star Trek is, for me, not only the best episode of any Trek series ever filmed, but it’s also the best Trek story of all time. It’s one of the great science fiction stories, one of the great science fiction romances, one of the great time travel stories, and its ending packs one of the greatest gut-punches ever.
If you’ve never seen it…you should. Really. The story doesn’t really require a huge amount of knowledge of Trek. The Enterprise is investigating strange “ripples in time” that are emanating from a particular planet, and during one such jolt, Dr. McCoy accidentally injects himself with an enormous overdose of a drug that drives him temporarily insane. He flees to the planet surface, and Kirk follows, with Spock and some others. They find themselves in the ruins of an ancient city, with one functioning artifact remaining: a giant portal which is actually a portal through time itself. McCoy, still mad, jumps through and into history, and suddenly the members of the landing party realize that the Enterprise is gone. McCoy has changed history so that the Federation never happened.
With no choice but to try and put things right, Kirk and Spock follow, and find themselves in 1930s New York City. While trying to figure out what McCoy did and where he is, they enter the employ of a woman named Edith Keeler, a visionary who runs a soup kitchen. Kirk falls in love with her…only to have Spock discover that what McCoy did was prevent Edith Keeler from dying in a car accident. If she survives, she lives to found a peace movement that prevents America’s entry into World War II, allowing the Nazis to win and take over the world.
Spock: Jim, Edith Keeler must die.
The story unfolds so organically that the episode feels longer, heftier, than its 50-minute or so running time. The episode feels large, and yet all of its key moments play out on an intimate stage, such as when Jim Kirk and Edith are walking along the street at night and Kirk tells Edith some things about the future, things that don’t even strike her as strange to be hearing from this man she’s just met. And the way she sizes up Kirk and Spock’s relationship:
Edith Keeler: [to Kirk] I still have a few questions I’d to ask about you two. Oh, and don’t give me that “Questions about little old us?” look. You know as well as I do how out of place you two are around here.
Spock: Interesting. Where would you estimate we belong, Miss Keeler?
Edith Keeler: [to Spock] You? At his side, as if you’ve always been there and always will. [to Kirk] And you… you belong… in another place. I don’t know where or how… I’ll figure it out eventually.
Spock: [to Kirk] I’ll finish with the furnace.
Edith Keeler: [to Kirk] “Captain.” Even when he doesn’t say it, he does.
“The City on the Edge of Forever” involves relatively little action. It relies on its character work, showing us that Kirk is falling in love with Edith Keeler before Spock’s discovery that she is the key focal point around which history will pivot. William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and Joan Collins likewise turn in amazing work in this episode. Collins’s Edith Keeler is probably the woman in James T. Kirk’s history, the one he could not save even though he desperately wanted to. Her death is the memory that he will carry with him forever. Shatner sells every single minute of this, never once over-emoting, never once going too far. His Kirk doesn’t just fall for a pretty woman. Shatner portrays a Kirk who has just discovered, hundreds of years in his past, a kindred spirit. He has found someone whom he can understand and who can understand him. And when he realizes that he may well have to stand by as she dies…Shatner’s portrayal of a man torn on both sides of the awfullest of dilemmas is so stark, so aching, that it always moves me nearly to tears.
And then the moment arrives.
The script’s other masterstroke is that Spock can’t determine when the awful event will occur. There is no “She dies on November 12, 1937.” This isn’t like Stephen King’s (masterful) 11-22-1963, when we know exactly when the events are going to occur. Kirk has no idea it’s happening, even as we do. He sees her coming back across the street. He starts out to help her…and then he stops. He knows. The moment is upon him, and it unfolds as quickly as it has to. No slow-motion here, no long-held gazes. It comes so quickly that for us, the viewers, it’s almost like–what? Was that it? Oh my God, that was it. Over, that quickly.
But Kirk not only had to let Edith die, his choice — his only choice — was more awful than that. Because Dr. McCoy was there too, and he didn’t know. They had just found him, seconds before, and now McCoy too is watching Edith Keeler walk into the path of the truck. Kirk can’t just stand aside, or stand still, and watch Edith die, because if the script allowed him that much, he’d be able to say later, “I couldn’t have saved her. She was too far away.”
The script doesn’t pull its punches. It doesn’t give Jim Kirk that one possible out, that one possible way he can morally justify it all to himself.
Jim Kirk doesn’t just passively allow Edith Keeler to die. Jim Kirk grabs McCoy and holds him back. Jim Kirk stops McCoy from saving her.
Kirk’s choice is an active one.
McCoy doesn’t know this. He doesn’t know any of it. He only knows that he could have saved her. His voice fills with rage.
McCoy: You deliberately stopped me, Jim! I could have saved her. Do you know what you just did?
And then Spock, summing it up so logically, so heart-breakingly, in a line that no actor other than Leonard Nimoy could have delivered:
Spock: He knows, Doctor. He knows.
One thing about Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan that has always bothered me was the idea of the Kobayashi Maru test, the idea that a false scenario could somehow test a cadet’s approach to a situation in which there is no possible “victory”. In that movie, Kirk openly says “I don’t believe in the no-win scenario,” and later on, after Spock’s death, he says that he has never really faced death. But in “The City on the Edge of Forever”, he faces both a no-win scenario, and he faces death. The idea that Kirk can later on claim otherwise has always seemed deeply false to me. Maybe he’s blocked the memory of Edith Keeler? Maybe it’s so painful that he doesn’t admit it in either case? Certainly Kirk never mentioned her again in any filmed episode or movie, which isn’t that surprising given the tendency of teevee shows back in that period to not mention previous events much. But the story here, this love between starship captain and soup-kitchen owner three hundred years before his time, is so iconic, and it carries so much weight, that it’s almost offensive to me to think that a James T. Kirk can exist who isn’t carrying her memory around. Maybe better, then, if in reply to his son David’s accusation that he never has faced death, Jim Kirk were to say, “There was one. She died saving us all, too.”
But then, you can’t have too many mentions, either. Trek would never again visit that City on the Edge of Forever, except in one episode of the animated series, and with good reason. No story involving the Guardian of Forever could possibly stand up to comparison with this one. Trek would not eschew time travel, by any means, but this particular means was left as a singular part of Trek mythology. I wonder if any Next Generation writers were tempted to visit it. I’m glad they didn’t. It is interesting, though, that Jean-Luc Picard would get his own kind of iconic time-travel story in “The Inner Light”, as would Benjamin Sisko in “The Visitor”.
James T. Kirk is an explorer at heart, and an adventurer. But his experiences in the past, via the Guardian of Forever, have a profound effect on him. At episode’s end, when he and Spock and McCoy return to the present with everything restored, the Guardian appeals to that part of his soul, offering to guide him and the others through history. What an offer to someone whose life is charged with boldly going! And yet, all Kirk can muster in that moment is a gruff, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“The City on the Edge of Forever” is the kind of story I dream of writing. For a single one-hour episode of a teevee show to hit so many emotional highs and lows? To linger in the memory as it does? I wonder if, as they were shooting it — maybe at the first table read — anyone either thought or muttered, “They’ll still be talking about this one in fifty years.”
Who knows? If my health permits, I’ll still be talking about this episode when it hits one hundred.
Emmylou Harris just turned 70.
Like many a great artist, I actually haven’t heard that much of her music over the years. As I’ve noted before — just last week! — my relationship with country music is complicated, and Harris isn’t really the type of singer that one hears a lot on the country stations these days anyway. Her brand of folkish country doesn’t seem to really ride alongside crap like “Red Solo Cup” and “Courtesy of the Red White and Blue”, does it?
But while Harris has never really been on my radar in a big way, I’ve always been aware of her and her lyrical voice. Here is a small selection of songs. Note the presence of three duets. This isn’t really an accident. Duets can be problematic for some singers, as they end up being mostly a song split in two, so that each singer can have equal share of the spotlight. Emmylou Harris has an instinctive sense of how to use her voice to complement that of her duet partner, whomever that might be. It’s not just how to harmonize or how to balance out, dynamics-wise. She pays attention to her partner and, most importantly, her partner’s phrasing. That’s pretty amazing, because every singer phrases differently.
I may not have heard much Emmylou Harris over the years, but I’ve never once heard her and not concluded that she’s amazing.
(For more, see Roger’s post.)
I heard this work on the radio just the other day and I found it captivating. It is Im Sommerwind — “In the Summer Wind” — by Anton Webern.
I am honestly not sure if I have ever heard anything by Webern before. Primarily an early-20th century composer, Webern is known for being one of the chief students and followers of Anton Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique, in which the traditional systems of tonality in Western music were finally broken down completely. I’ve always found twelve-tone music difficult, and in truth I have honestly never much explored it (and yes, perhaps I should). This piece is an early work of Webern’s, written before he really took Schoenberg’s twelve-tone lessons to heart, but it is still easy to hear the way it straddles the line between Romanticism and Modernism. This work is deeply steeped in the late Wagnerian sound, the post-Tristan period when a lot of music felt like it was simultaneously grounded and at sea.
Webern apparently felt that Im Sommerwind was not representative of where, as a young man, he wanted to go as a composer, and he shelved the piece. It went unperformed until 1962, fifteen years after the composer’s death.
For those of a musical mind:
An Eb note, a C note, and a G note walk into a bar. The barman says, “Sorry, we don’t serve minors here.”
C sends Eb a dirty look. “I told you to act natural!”
You all need an earworm. I’m here to provide.
I know, it’s not Thursday. But hey, whoever said I had to stick to the schedule?
I’ve had an odd relationship with country music my entire life. On balance, it generally isn’t my cup of tea, but when a country song gets under my skin, it really gets under my skin, and this — “Y’all Come Back Saloon”, by the Oak Ridge Boys — is a perfect example. I love this song to death. I don’t know why I’ve been listening to it a bit of late, but I have (and I’ve almost certainly featured it on Something for Thursday at one point or another). It goes back in my memory a long, long way — all the way back to my childhood. I looked it up, and the song’s 40th anniversary is coming up later this year. Wow.
I think I really respond to the country songs that have a hint of sadness to them. The best country songs always seem to deal with sad memories, of loves lost and people looking back over hard lives. That’s what this song sounds like to me…and then there are the wonderful lyrics. I mean, the first verse (heard after the chorus, for an interesting formal change) is pure poetry:
In a voice soft and trembling, she’d sing her song to Cowboy,
As a smoky halo circled ’round her raven hair.
And all the fallen angels and pinball playin’ rounders
Stopped the games that they’d been playin’ for the loser’s evening prayer.
I don’t care how much you claim to hate country music, that is some wonderful writing there. The smoky halo circling her raven hair? That is a perfect image for a song like this, as is the notion of an entire saloon’s clientele falling silent as the raven-haired beauty with her tambourine starts her song. Of course, the song’s melody will lodge in your ear in the best way. What a great song.
This live performance is terrific. Please don’t laugh at the Saturday Night Fever outfits they’re wearing! This is a terrific performance. There are more recent renditions on YouTube as well, if you want to hear how the group has changed over the years.
Easter is coming, so in that vein, a concert overture by the great orchestral master Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. His Russian Easter Festival Overture is a work that pays tribute to Easter and the Russian Orthodox liturgies. The composer actually uses a number of liturgical melodies and chants throughout the work, giving the piece a feel of being both older and newer than it actually is. Apparently in Russia Easter is called “the Bright Holiday”, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s overture teems with both a celebration of the Resurrection and a more pagan exultation in the coming of Spring.
Oops. Time got away from me yesterday. So what to do? Resort to the old favorites, of course. Lerner and Loewe, performed by Maurice Chevalier. Here is “I’m Glad I’m Not Young Anymore” from Gigi.
